Modernize Command Centers with Business Journey Observability: The Future of IT Operations

Banks and financial services have to prioritize operational efficiency and delivering seamless customer experiences. With complex microservices, API-driven ecosystems, and user-centric business models, rethinking how they monitor and manage IT infrastructure has become essential.

 A shift from traditional observability to Business Journey Observability is a key enabler in providing holistic, real-time insights into digital transactions, customer experience, and underlying application stacks.

This blog explores how Business Journey Observability is transforming command centers, accelerating incident response times, and setting the stage for further automation and AI-driven solutions.

Introduction: Connecting Telemetry with Business Journey Observability

Business Journey Observability brings a game-changing approach to how digital transactions are monitored. Unlike traditional observability tools that focus on logs, metrics, and traces (the MELT metrics), Business Journey Observability connects telemetry data across multiple touchpoints and APIs, but in the specific context of a digital journey.

This means that instead of seeing isolated events across infrastructure, applications, and services, organizations can view the entire transaction journey lifecycle—from the moment a user initiates an interaction to the moment the transaction is completed. Whether it’s a digital payment, loan approval, or account aggregation request, this holistic view offers deep visibility into how each touchpoint contributes to the success (or failure) of the user journey.

By correlating telemetry data within the context of a business journey, IT teams are no longer just addressing technical errors but are actively aligning their efforts with business outcomes—such as user satisfaction, transaction success rates, and overall system performance.

Image: Structure of Current vs Modern Command Center

Image: Approach to Golden Signals in Traditional vs Business Journey Observability

The Shift to SRE-Led Operations: Measuring What Matters

Along with this new observability model, the traditional roles of L1/L2 support teams are constantly evolving. The shift is towards Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), who focus not just on maintaining system uptime but also on business-centric metrics. SREs now track digital product performance metrics like reliability, resilience, latencies, error rates, and the right SLOs (Service Level Objectives) that align directly with both user experience and business objectives.

This shift ensures that operational metrics are no longer viewed in isolation but are integrated with the broader business strategy. By linking  business and technical metrics, SREs are empowered to make data-driven decisions that improve not only system performance but also customer experience.

Image: Understanding SRE-Led Metrics

From Siloed Tools to User-Centric Alerts and Journey-Centric MTTR

Traditionally, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) relied on siloed tools that generated their own alerts—network tools would report network issues, application monitoring tools would signal app crashes, and so on. However, this fragmented approach often led to slow resolution times and finger-pointing between teams.

In a Business Journey Observability model, alerts are no longer siloed but user-centric, focusing on lead indicators of user experience. Instead of being overwhelmed by irrelevant alerts, IT teams can now focus on those that directly impact the business journey. This results in a faster Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and a journey-centric Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), reducing the need for prolonged war room discussions where each team claims, “It’s not our issue.”

By streamlining alert management, command centers can drastically reduce the time to detect and resolve issues, ensuring that digital services run smoothly and that user experience remains unaffected.

The Road Ahead: Automating Command Center Operations

The transformation to a business-centric model opens up new possibilities for automation. With clear visibility into business journeys, there is an opportunity to further automate alerts and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Automation tools  now follow predefined workflows and escalate issues through integrated channels like WhatsApp, Slack, or PagerDuty, ensuring faster and more efficient incident resolution.

This automation doesn’t just stop at alerting—it extends to incident resolution as well, allowing systems to self-correct before human intervention is required. The result? Faster problem resolution, fewer manual errors, and more efficient command center operations.

Image: Evolution of Command Centers

The Future with GenAI: Enhancing Command Centers with AI-Driven Insights

The next frontier for command centers is GenAI (Generative AI). By enabling enterprise-grade RAG/LLM (Retrieval Augmented Generation/Large Language Models), companies can integrate diverse knowledge bases—ranging from observability metrics and transaction performance data to incident history and ticket IDs.

These GenAI-powered systems can automatically create situational chat rooms, where all relevant data about a particular incident is gathered and displayed in real-time. This provides incident response teams with the insights they need to take the next best action, speeding up incident resolution and minimizing the impact on users.

By integrating GenAI with existing observability systems, organizations can enhance decision-making and accelerate the problem-solving process. This AI-driven approach is set to redefine how command centers operate, moving from reactive responses to proactive and predictive operations.

Executive Dashboards: Transparency for Business and IT Leaders

As observability matures, real-time business dashboards are becoming essential for CXOs and business teams. These dashboards provide transparent, real-time visibility into the health of digital products, tracking metrics that matter most to business outcomes—whether it’s transaction success rates, customer satisfaction scores, or uptime.

By offering unified views that combine technical metrics with business data, these dashboards empower business leaders to make informed decisions quickly. The result is a more agile, responsive organization that can adapt to market demands and ensure business continuity even during major IT disruptions.

Conclusion: The Command Center of the Future

Image: Key Elements of a Modern Command Center

The modern command center is no longer just about managing infrastructure and resolving technical issues. It’s about connecting the dots between technical performance and business outcomes. With Business Journey Observability, SRE-led operations, and the integration of GenAI, organizations are now better equipped to handle the complexities of today’s digital services.

As businesses continue to evolve and expand, so too must their command centers—becoming more user-centric, more automated, and more aligned with the needs of the modern digital landscape.